Experts at Georgetown Panel Assess the Future of U.S. Antitrust Enforcement

Promotional graphic for U.S. Antitrust Policy event on economics, populism, or politics, with the headshots of the five panelists

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The Center for Business and Public Policy (CBPP) at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business hosted a thought-provoking discussion on the future of U.S. antitrust enforcement, featuring three leading experts whose perspectives captured the tension and uncertainty animating today’s competition policy landscape. The event was moderated by John Mayo, executive director of the center and Elsa Carlson McDonough Chair in Business Administration, and Mark Whitener, adjunct professor at Georgetown McDonough.

To open the program, panelists were asked to describe the Trump administration’s emerging antitrust approach in a single word. Their answers were “potentially consequential,” “walking a line,” and “idiosyncratic,” and provided a compact but powerful frame for the conversation that followed.

Debra Garza, vice chair at Rule Garza Howley and former deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ), explained her choice of “potentially consequential” by pointing to pending monopoly cases against Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Google. “How those cases are resolved,” she argued, “will have effects in the companies, but they will have effects in industries, maybe as much as in the breakup of AT&T.”

Howard Shelanski, former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Bureau of Economics and a senior official in the Obama administration, described the Trump administration as “walking a line” between differentiating itself from Biden-era policy while maintaining strong enforcement. “There is a desire… to pull back on procedural overreach but still investigate hard,” he said, noting that the shift suggests a more pragmatic posture on process and remedies, even as consumer-facing sectors continue to receive close scrutiny

Larry White, professor at NYU’s Stern School, characterized the moment as “idiosyncratic,” underscoring how uneven the policy signals remain. “It may be nine months in, but it’s still early days,” he noted, stressing that long-standing tensions, such as when to intervene in fast-moving tech markets, persist regardless of the administration.

Much of the discussion focused on the Google Search decision and the difficulty of crafting remedies in digital markets. Shelanski observed that liability and remedy findings do not always align, with White adding that courts may be missing opportunities for structural clarity.

Garza connected these challenges to long-running timing dilemmas in antitrust. “The danger of intervening too early is you don’t really know how things are going to play out. The danger of waiting too long is [that] the structure is now baked.”

Audience questions added further depth, highlighting public concern about labor monopsony, market concentration, and the role of tech executives in shaping policy. White predicted continued interest in labor-market harms — “we’re going to see more of it” — while Garza and Shelanski cautioned against expecting antitrust to resolve broader issues such as wage stagnation and inequality.

The discussion underscored the uncertainty facing U.S. competition policy as the administration navigates high-stakes litigation, evolving merger scrutiny, and institutional change at the FTC and DOJ. As the panel concluded, the three opening words, “potentially consequential,” “walking a line,” and “idiosyncratic,” proved prescient descriptors of an enforcement landscape both unsettled and deeply important.

Watch the full discussion on our YouTube channel.